I felt that my daddy had been kind of like Jesus in that he’d suffered for our sins. Not our sins, maybe, just maybe our freedom. Him and about three million other guys. He hadn’t been eaten by the sharks at Guadalcanal, or burned alive on the Coral Sea, but he’d had cold feet in Germany and had killed soldiers of the enemy forces and recovered pictures of their children. All that hadn’t made him a happy man. He had shot a man one day and had that man’s kid come up looking for his father the next day. He knew because he’d seen the picture of the kid in the man’s hand the day before. He’d given the kid a piece of chocolate, and hadn’t told him that his father was buried in a mass grave along with about two hundred other dead people. I think some days they just shot them like dogs. I think that most days they thought no more of them than dogs. By the time my father got to Auschwitz he was pretty pissed at the German race in particular. And I think that later in life he regretted all his anger, but what was he supposed to do about it then?

This girl, this lunatic lesbian, she leaned over and asked me if I was Leon Barlow. I admitted that I was. I kept hoping that a friend would come in, somebody I knew, somebody who might buy me a drink. I watched the door for a while but only strangers came in. I drank slowly and watched the movie. Charlton had Warren Oates shot for a deserter and then went off to chase some more Indians. Senta Berger’s tits kept swaying magnificently in the background and it nearly drove me crazy. I wanted to rut with somebody like an animal, like a fuck-machine with a microchip for a brain. I was horny and I knew that if I was a woman in the right situation I could drink free all night. I knew that the terrible woman with the bad teeth was locked into a big spender who only wanted a little of her puss. I knew she’d give it gladly.

This girl next to me said: “So you’re Leon Barlow, huh?”

I said: “Yeah, goddamnit, I’m him.”

She said: “You want to buy me a pack of cigarettes? I ain’t going to screw you.”

I said: “Darlin’, I don’t want you to screw me. Buy your own damn pack of cigarettes.”